The Life of a Raiding Feral Druid

Mangle revisited…

So back when 3.3.3 hit I wrote a short what not on why the change to the Mangle glyph did not warrant a mangle spam build.

One tool at everyone’s disposal is WOL. This is where people post parses of combat logs from actual gameplay and raids to analyze later for checking on their own in game performance, or what others are doing during a raid.

A look at the parse HERE will show you that the 2nd highest DPSing Kitty on Heroic Saurfang (the first highest was a Russian kitty which made the parse hard to read) is obviously not using a mangle spam build. Just hover your mouse over his name and take a look at the breakdown… that is right folks, no mangle there.

Click on his name, and then the damage by spell tab and you will notice he mangled…. 4 times.

Feel free to go through the rankings for any given boss in ICC, find the ferals, and see what they are doing… pretty sure it’s not mangle spam. Just go to the main WOL page, then rankings, then DPS, then ICC. Pick your size and difficulty raid tab, then click more to get past all the warriors with Shadowmourne.

Another way to use WOL to your benefit is to look up some of these high DPSing ferals on the armory. Make sure to use the EU armory when looking up EU players, and US for US. Now you can take a look at the builds, glyphs, and gear choices of some of the highest DPSing kitties in game.

I was up there for a short point in time but players and gear have passed me by with my focus on mounts and achievements and 10 man raiding.

Frankly, I am no longer motivated by gear and high DPS numbers but progression, achievements, mounts, and titles. I get the best I can to contribute as much as possible but in the end sound game play, good strategy, and a good connection is usually enough…. of course that could be the 15% buff talking.

6 Responses to Mangle revisited…

If you want to narrow the list down to just ferals, choose your raid size/difficulty, then click on “More” for whichever boss you’re interested in. On the following page, just above the list of top players, there is a horizontal list of all dps specs. Click on the spec you want and voila.

And…? What I means is that I don’t really understand why you posted this entry.
I’m the one who tested Mangle-spam and reported the results on EJ: it is a DPS loss, at least if you’re able to execute the shred cycle well, so it’s not a surprise that top-level ferals go for shred (and using facemauler/fbn/ovale to optimize it even more).
At the same time it’s not that much of a loss (3-8%, i.e. approximately the same order of the stddev of simulationcraft results), so if you’re not a top-raider and just want to play in a more relaxed way you can go mangle-spam for little cost.

I didn’t see that post on EJ, I posted the entry to give people insight on another tool to learn about their class and what others are doing in it.

Doing a mangle spam in this age of WOW hurts more than your DPS, it hurts your credibility in the game as well. To some it doesn’t matter, to others it might explain why they don’t get invited back to a raid.

Most guilds will look at things like glyphs, specs, and WOL reports to determine if a player is worth a raid slot and seeing someone mangle spam because they want to relax is a sure fire way to end up pugging content on a permanent basis.

The discussion is in the “Feral DPS discussion” around page 32-33. It started because someone mentioned it and I decided to give it a real-world try. The shred cycle is hard to execute, so it could be that less errors in the cycle could compensate the theoretical DPS loss… which of couse is impossible to see on a few combats…. I still managed 11k on Festergut with 0 shreds and +5% ICC buff.

As for “credibility”: where I play people seem to look nowhere beyond Gearscore for PU raids…. guild applications are another matter of course, there it will depend on who you meet. At the same time, someone willing to experiment with different builds, even sub-optimal, but who is able to explan what and why will often be ahead of the cookie-cutter-build-type of player. As someone in my guild put it “his glyphs, stuff and cycle are ok, but at the same time everybody knows how to read forums.”